Roy Ascott — La Plissure du Texte — global telematic collaborative novel

1983

Artists: Roy Ascott · Year: 1983 · Medium: Telematic art — 14 cities worldwide connected by modem during ARTELEC 83 exhibition, collaboratively writing a distributed fairy-tale text · Substrate: Modem-connected terminals in 14 cities worldwide; ASCII text posted to shared database; continuous 12-day collaborative writing session · Place: Paris, France (ARC); distributed globally · Institution: ARC/Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (host venue) Roy Ascott's La Plissure du Texte (1983) was a planetary-scale collaborative text-writing project executed over a two-week period in December 1983 across eleven cities on three continents. Eleven nodes — in Paris, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Alma (Quebec), Sydney, Amsterdam, Bristol, Honolulu, Toronto, Wellington, and Vienna — were each assigned a fairy-tale archetype (The Princess, The Magician, The Wise Old Woman, The Trickster, and so on). Each node sat at a terminal connected through the I.P. Sharp Timesharing system, a proprietary international network of the period that pre-dated the public internet, and contributed text fragments in the voice of their assigned archetype. The fragments accumulated, layered, and cross-referenced in real time into a distributed, never-resolved, polyphonic story. The title is a play on Roland Barthes's Le Plaisir du texte (1973) — "plissure" is "folding" or "pleating" rather than "pleasure" — and Ascott intended the reference seriously. The argument was that a text produced by twelve cultural contexts speaking through twelve archetypes was not a collaborative work in the modernist sense (a fixed object, made by multiple hands, but internally coherent) but a genuinely pleated text, whose meaning existed in the cross-talk and contradictions between nodes. La Plissure du Texte is, operationally, the earliest ambitious realization of what would later be called "net art" and "network literature." It pre-dated Mosaic by ten years, the World Wide Web by six years, and Minitel-based collective writing projects by several years. Ascott had been developing theoretical frameworks for networked art practice throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s; La Plissure du Texte was its executable demonstration. Every later piece in this archive that uses networked participation as its medium — from the Nettime mailing list culture of the mid-1990s to Rhizome, to the large-scale collaborative fiction platforms of the 2010s — descends from the 1983 argument. Ascott turned 89 in 2023 and is retired from active practice but still gives occasional lectures on the network premise he first articulated and executed here. Lore The I.P. Sharp Timesharing network — founded in Toronto in 1964 — was one of the few international computer networks available in 1983 outside of military and academic research settings; Ascott obtained time on it through a Canadian government grant, brokered by the Canadian artist-activist Bill Bartlett and by Roy Ascott's connections at the Banff Centre. The eleven nodes paid for their own terminal time; volunteers staffed them around the clock. The project's total textual output ran to several hundred thousand words, archived at the time on IP Sharp's mainframes and later recovered — partially — by Ascott's students in the 1990s. The surviving corpus is held at the Ascott archive at Planetary Collegium in Plymouth. Some of the original participants became permanent members of network-art circles for the next thirty years. Sources • Ascott, Roy — Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (ed. Shanken, UC Press, 2003). • Shanken, Edward A. — "Telematic Embrace: A Love Story? Roy Ascott's Theories of Telematic Art" (Leonardo, 1997). • Planetary Collegium, Plymouth — Ascott Archive.